The cottage Mike Duffy claimed as his primary senatorial residence never had water in the winter and was sometimes so snowbound it was completely inaccessible, the suspended senator’s Prince Edward Island caretaker testified at Duffy’s criminal trial Thursday.

Duffy didn’t go there in the winter, Clifford Dollar said, and didn’t know how bad it could get until he tried it.

“He went out and he couldn’t see the cottage from the road because he was sitting in the car. So he took me word for it after that,” Dollar testified.

Duffy, sitting over on the left side of the courtroom with his wife Heather, smiled. It may be the only time his impassive expression has cracked in six weeks.

Cliff Dollar has that effect. Dollar is 71 years old, an Islander through and through, and a bit hard of hearing. He testified over the phone from his home in Springvale, where his wife occasionally jogged his memory or helped him find a paper record.

(“I’m sure we broke a few rules of evidence with that,” Judge Charles Vaillancourt half-joked when Dollar was done. None of the lawyers complained.)

The handyman’s testimony matters to the case Crown prosecutors are trying to make out that Duffy’s claim that his cottage in Cavendish was his primary residence was a fraud, and he wasn’t entitled to claim expenses for staying in Ottawa.

The fact he did so led to just a couple of the 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery the broadcaster-turned-Conservative-senator faces, but they’re big and important ones. Although it’s not specifically an issue in the trial, prosecutor Mark Holmes has argued that Duffy, who’d lived in Ottawa for decades, wasn’t eligible to sit as a senator from P.E.I., and that influenced the choices he made as a politician that have led to his legal battle.

Dollar testified that he set Duffy up with the Cavendish cottage in the first place, after he’d rented one nearby for a few years.

“It was a nice cottage. It had three bedrooms in it and a nice-sized living-room in it and a nice-sized kitchen and an entryway with a laundry machine in it,” Dollar testified. But in 2009, after being named to the Senate, Duffy started spending heavily to make it a place that could, at least theoretically, serve as a year-round dwelling.

It had no foundation then so it could be very cold. If the pipes had water in them, they’d freeze unless the place was being heated electrically, and even that would be chancy in the coldest months.

“It’d be touchy goin’ at that time,” Dollar said.

The water from the well was contaminated and Dollar installed an ultraviolet treatment system. He helped when Duffy ultimately decided to have the place jacked up and an insulated foundation put in.

Even so, the lane isn’t plowed when it snows.

“Sometimes the thieves start hittin’ around. Sometimes if I hear somebody else is getting hit, I’ll go out and check,” Dollar said. “Friendly Lane is mostly closed in. I have to walk in to the cottages.”

It’s about 500 feet from a nearby church parking lot. There’s no parking allowed on the provincial highway the lane turns off.

Defence lawyer Donald Bayne has argued that these logistics are irrelevant to the cottage’s status as Duffy’s primary residence, a term that’s not clearly defined anywhere in the Constitution or Senate documents. By definition, once he became a senator for Prince Edward Island, the property he owned there became the most important thing he owned, Bayne contends, no matter where he spends most of his time.

Dollar was just one of nine witnesses in a day of peak efficiency for Duffy’s trial.

Prosecutors Holmes and Jason Neubauer also whipped through testimony on funerals Duffy flew to at Senate expense. That’s allowed if the deceased is a dignitary but not if the senator’s connection to him or her is personal. For a prominent senator, it could genuinely be hard to tell the difference.

At one, he gave the eulogy for a friend of his mother. Taxpayers paid about $1,400 for him to “visit (his) region,” according to travel claims filed in court. Bayne pointed out the late Isobel DeBlois was a descendant of one of P.E.I.’s early premiers.

At another, he gave a scripture reading. It cost about $1,700 for “Senate business.” Bayne pointed out the late Robert LeClair was a popular basketball coach and a longtime Tory activist.

At a third, he simply attended quietly. Duffy and the late Cliff Stewart were friends and amateur radio enthusiasts, apparently. This cost about $3,500 for “Senate business.” Bayne pointed out Stewart was a Second World War spy and electronics expert, widely known in Prince Edward Island.

The trial also heard about a contentious trip Duffy and his wife took to Vancouver at public expense, ostensibly to attend the nearby Saanich Fair. Except that they never actually got there and instead spent several days in the city where two of Duffy’s grown children live — going to a play in which his daughter performed, shopping, and hiking Grouse Mountain (Duffy’s wife Heather did that, not the senator). It cost taxpayers about $8,200.

Of the three separate Saanich Conservative party activists who testified, none was completely sure how Duffy got invited to attend in the first place, let alone how his visit was cancelled.

His diary records the fact of the cancellation the day it was supposed to happen, when he was already in Vancouver but before he hopped the Georgia Strait to Saanich. Tory organizer Bruce Hallsor was pretty sure they’d talked about calling the visit off before Duffy had left Ottawa, when he demanded to have his travel expenses covered by the local riding association.

It’ll take more witnesses before that’s sorted out, if it even can be.

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